Fives on Friday, 1/19/2024
The Pitchfork News, Techno-Optimism vs Digital Mysticism, and more!
Happy Friday! Congratulations on making it to the end of the week. As you head into your weekend, here are five general recommendations, five track reviews, and five album micro reviews. Access to these curated links and tunes will only cost you your time and enduring five pieces of self-promotion from me. Maybe you’ll find something new to read, listen to, or do this weekend. See you next week!
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This Wednesday, by decree of Condé Nast, the long-running digital music publication Pitchfork was “brought into” the men’s lifestyle magazine GQ. Based on the number of longtime staff members now out of a job this seems to be the kind of “organizational changes” two tall men in trench coats make in back alleys shortly after saying “you got it, boss”. Though its currently unclear what shape Pitchfork will be left in, the track record for these kinds of corporate-mandated re-shufflings ain’t great. Many musicians, fans, and above all music writers in my circles are treating this is yet another hammer blow to the fabric of music culture. I’ve read Pitchfork on a near daily basis since roughly 2006. As often as I have groaned, groused, and grumbled about the site, Pitchfork has had an incalculable impact on my taste in music and my own music criticism. For all of the laments about the site’s turn to poptimism in the last decade, Pitchfork consistently platformed obscure, avant-garde, and international artists that seem unlikely to get the same opportunity at GQ. Judging from pieces by writers like Patrick Lyons and Laura Snapes in the wake of the news, it also seemed like a well ran and gratifying place to work.
The headline “Is there a Godzilla of 9/11?” would earn a surefire click from me regardless of the author, but knowing that there’s a Max Read article on the other end of the link made that click all the more urgent. I’ll reserve judgement on Read’s conclusions until I see the second half of the argument, but this first half is worth a look for its taxonomy of post-9/11 American cinema and survey of 00s/2010s culture. If he doesn’t bring up Jennifer’s Body in the follow-up, I’ll be bummed!
As long as we’re keeping our eye trained on the past, I enjoyed this recent series from Patrick Roesle about how the aesthetics of 1990s techno-optimism were reworked into ironic and eventually cynically nostalgic internet based electronic music in 2010s (vaporwave, synthwave etc), charting along the way how our relationship with the internet has changed over the last 30 years.
Continuing our reverse chronological journey, I loved Frank Guan’s recent essay about Don DeLillo’s 1980s novels for N+1. Guan does an excellent job tying the novels themselves together, as well as placing them in the context of the rest of American counter-cultural art in the Reagan era (I had never thought to consider Blood Meridian and Reign in Blood as contemporaries before) and deftly critiques the cliche of the quirked up white boy systems novel. Did you know that you can sing “quirked up white boy systems novel” to the tune of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles theme? Well, you do now!
Finally, this piece in Aeon catalogs how internet users are throwing it all the way back to the mysticism of the last turn of the century. Though I found the piece’s analysis helpful, I wish they had gone into more detail about the similarities between coding and spell casting, as well as the way that the current web’s lack of transparency encourages a less material understanding of the digital world.
# # # # # The Self Promo Zone # # # # #
Final warning! Laughing Stock play to-morr-ow night!! That’s January 20th, to be clear, and we’ll be rocking out at Windjammer in Ridgewood, Queens alongside Corner Soul and Retail Drugs. We go on first, so come through early and say hello!
I learned earlier this week that GUNK’s For Palestine compilation, which features my cover of The Style Council’s “A Stone’s Throw Away” along with a number of exclusive tracks from the New York indie scene, has made over $2000 dollars for the Palestine Youth Movement and Anera. That rocks! Keep it up!
In honor of the new Massa Nera/Quiet Fear split that dropped last week, check out my interview with bassist AJ Santillan on Lamniformes Radio about the last Massa Nera full length! I’ll have another more personal reason to talk more about Santillan’s excellent guitar skills shortly, so stay tuned!
Actually… if you want to hear AJ Santillan and I play music together, you can give my song “Prayer of the Open Plain” a listen right now! In fact, you can watch a full music video for the tune and read my thoughts right here! Wow!
My apologies, it’s taken far too long for me to thank my newest subscribers. Welcome! Thanks for joining the party. If you’ve enjoyed what you’ve read so far, consider upgrading to $5 a month, which will give you access to the full Drumming Upstream archives, as well as other monthly bonus features. No pressure, though! If you can’t swing it, I hope you’ll enjoy the free listening diary and micro reviews below.
~ ~ ~ ~ ~ Listening Diary ~ ~ ~ ~ ~
Here are five songs that I enjoyed listening to recently. You can find a playlist with all of this year’s tracks at the bottom of this section.
“Defeatist” by BEAR (Vanta, 2023)
Shouts out to the wonderful To The Teeth for putting this band on my radar. BEAR get a lot right that many bands following in Meshuggah’s grand canyon sized footsteps get wrong. They don’t drown the riffs in goopy lead lines or outsmart themselves by stringing together the longest polyrhythms they can think of. Instead, they keep things bone dry and, as far as Djent is concerned, relatively simple. There’s just enough melody to keep the track balanced, but not too much to distract from the beefy heaviness. And, in a stroke of genuine inspiration, they let someone go absolutely wild on the sax when you least expect it.
“Space Movement Section 4” by Creation Rebel (Starship Africa, 1980)
Here’s another track that I wouldn’t have heard without the direction of another newsletter. Burning Ambulance gets the credit this time, with an assist from Josh Landis of Limbs Bin who posted about the record on Instagram. I’ve been meaning to get familiar with more dub music ever since I read Neuromancer. If you are interested in reading Neuromancer and playing lyric-less music in the background while you do so, you could do a lot worse than Creation Rebel. An artifact of the future.
“Besaha” by The Devil’s Anvil (Hard Rock From the Middle East, 1967)
My roommate Ashna Ali’s friend Nour Mohammed Hodeib recommended this one to me after the two of us geeked out about Zamrock one night. First off, absolutely badass band name. This is a great example of how far back rock’s relationship with Middle Eastern music goes. Half of the album title is an exaggeration of course, this is hard rock from at best the lower east side. The point isn’t authenticity but the possibility that the fusion of worlds and styles opens up. Chiefly in this case, the possibility of sick riffs.
“Store Check” by Oval (94 Diskont, 1995)
My other roommate Noah Ortega put me onto this one. This sounds like being wrapped up in a cocoon made of wires. That I typed the previous sentence intending it fully as a compliment should tell you what the long term effect of repeatedly hearing the now forgotten melody of a dial-up internet connection when I was of soft brain age had on my idea of a relaxing sound.
“Angel” by Towa Tei (Last Century Modern, 1999)
Rounding out this collection of songs sent my way by other writers, this came across my path thanks to This Side of Japan. The first half is fashionable, cosmopolitan, electronica that sounds like a glossy magazine on a translucent coffee table. The second half drops the vocal jazz and goes stupid hard. Without a spotlight on the vocals the dense web of percussion holding the track together comes alive. I love how short the kick drum samples are, to the point where half of the “attack” is the sound of the sample cutting off. Terrific panning too.
\ \ \ \ \ Micro Reviews / / / / /
Now, onto the five micro reviews. Long time Lamniformes Instagram followers will recognize these from my stories back in late 2020, however they’ve been re-edited and spruced up with links so that you can actually hear the music instead of just taking my word for it.
Heads up! There’s some NSFW art directly beneath this warning!
The Truth by Bleeding Through (2006) - Metalcore
You know, I’d been trying to put my finger on what the LA Clippers black and white jerseys (circa 2020) reminded me of. It was the art design for this record. I was SO psyched for this record when I was a teen. One of the few albums I listened to multiple times in a row when I first got it. The start of this record is great, really tightly written aggressive metalcore. It tails off hard after the first few tracks, though. Some really corny choruses sure, but more importantly the heavy stuff feels overthought and not direct enough to keep the opening’s momentum.
Alive in Athens by Iced Earth (1999) - Heavy Metal
[Editor’s Note: I wrote this one before Iced Earth guitarist Jon Schaffer was seen breaking into the Capitol building on January 6th, 2021. Needless to say I thought he was a cornball before he did that and my opinion of him has not changed.]
Three disc live album, an absurd flex for a band like this. I am stunned by how brazenly they copied the Iron Maiden art style on this, and how much they copied Iron Maiden in general. I can’t judge though because I think I borrowed this album from a friend and forgot to return it. Oops. Musically this is a Venn diagram between Maiden and Metallica, but with none of the ingenuity or enthusiasm. Very well performed, but the crowd really does a lot to see these songs. The between song banter is unintentionally hilarious. After this the band went full tea-party and doomed themselves to wackness.
Opiate by Tool (1992) - Hard Rock
As a Tool completist in high school this one took me forever to find. I finally grabbed it in a record store in upstate NY and didn’t feel like it was worth the hassle when I listened to it. Aggrieved man yells in car about free speech: the EP. This barely resembles the Tool that most people know. Way more meat-headed, but you can hear hints of their rhythmic vocabulary developing.
Quintessence by Borknagar (2000) - Black Metal
The first of their records that I picked up. As I mentioned in a previous review I checked this band out on a recommendation from a Myspace group called The Mosh Pit. I was sold on their connections to the more avant grade side of the Norwegian black metal scene. This album is fine, although the clean vocals don’t go down easily. I like the way they’re trying to connect black metal with synth-heavy prog, but the songs never elevate out of the background for me.
Undertow by Tool (1993) - Hard Rock
Not my favorite Tool record as a teen, but one I appreciated because it had drum parts that I could actually figure out how to play, as opposed to their later stuff which flummoxed me for years. Gotta say, a lot of these lyrics are an uncomfortable listen in the light of the anonymous accusations going around about MJK a few years ago. Artistic license and all that, but I probably won’t be revisiting this one again.